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Swipe right for equality: how Bumble is taking on sexism

Whitney Wolfe's dating app Bumble set out to empower women. Now, as the former Tinder co-founder launches a rival to LinkedIn, Wolfe has her sights set on a bigger issue: tackling tech's sexism problem

Whitney Wolfe used to picture a social network where there were no men, one where there would only be compliments. The CEO of the dating app Bumble sits under fairy lights at the deliberately distressed picnic table of an Austin café, chewing on deep-fried oysters. Nat King Cole plays from a speaker, the air faint with the scent of Texas bluebonnets blooming nearby. "I had been bullied and pretty much attacked on the internet," the 27-year-old says, her eyes hidden behind jewelled, mirrored sunglasses, enormous geometric gold earrings glinting in the Texas sun. She jiggles the ice in her hibiscus mint tea as she says "bullied". "I was really depressed, really sad and had horrible anxiety."

In 2014, Wolfe quit her job at the world's most-downloaded dating app, Tinder. A co-founder of the company, she resigned after allegedly being sexually harassed by her colleague Justin Mateen, who sent her a series of abusive text messages after she ended their romantic relationship. Mateen allegedly called her a "whore" at a work event, while another co-founder, Sean Rad, purportedly said that having a female co-founder made Tinder "seem like a joke". The sexual harassment lawsuit Wolfe later filed against the company was settled without admission of wrongdoing, and she is not permitted to discuss its terms.

During our day together, she mentions Tinder only four times - to clarify that she's not, in fact, talking about the company at all.

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"It sent me into such a deep depression," explains Wolfe - not because of the Tinder lawsuit, but due to the press coverage and internet comments that followed it. She couldn't sleep, focus or take care of herself, and says that she was "probably drinking too much" just to make herself feel better. "The fact that strangers on the internet could drive me to do that to myself was really scary. It made me realise if I had been 13 and going through that I might not have come out of it."

"I want to reconfigure the way that we treat each other. That's it. That's the core of Bumble."Whitney Wolfe, founder of Bumble

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The news of Wolfe's lawsuit broke just three days before her 25th birthday. The hatred and vitriol she experienced sparked, she says, an "internalised epiphany" about what to do next: that "this pervasive dark culture exists on social media and it is going to destroy the mental well-being and self-esteem of all of these women across the world. I wanted to fix that."

She shakes her head. "I was like: I am not going back into that water. I am out. I have done my time."

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Eventually, Wolfe acquiesced. Three years later, 17.5 million people have registered with Bumble, and the app has been responsible for more than 1.2 billion matches. Though its design will be familiar to anyone used to the swipe-left-for-no, swipe-right-for-yes mechanic as popularised by Tinder, Bumble is singular in that after a man and a woman match, only the woman is able to initiate a conversation. "Make the first move," instructs the app (and Wolfe, who uses the catchphrase nine times during lunch). In March 2016, Bumble launched BFF, a way for the app's users to find platonic female friends in their area. "I had created something great and I couldn't use it," says Wolfe, explaining her motivation to build BFF. (Wolfe subsequently hired Bumble employees after meeting them on the platform.)

"Someone asked me the other day: 'What is Bumble, what is the core of Bumble, where is it going?'" she says, "And I told them that I want to end abusive relationships, that's it.

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"And if you think for one second that an abusive relationship is mutually exclusive to a man and a woman, you are wrong." Her speech takes on the air of a sermon. "I have had abusive friendships, where I felt they were toxic, I have seen abuse in almost every form of connecting, and I want to reconfigure the way that we treat each other. That's it. That's the core of Bumble."

Bumble's previous offices in Austin, texas, known as 'The Hive'

Jeff Wilson

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In September 2015, LinkedIn hit the headlines after a barrister, Charlotte Proudman, complained that a man had used the service to proposition her. After she tweeted the exchange, Proudman went on to receive death and rape threats from strangers. "I've been approached on LinkedIn for dating, and it is a problem," explains Wolfe.

In February 2017, the author and engineer Susan Fowler wrote a 3,000-word blog post about her time working at Uber. On her first day, she says that her new manager sent her "a string of messages" about his open relationship, relaying that he was having trouble finding new partners. "It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him," Fowler wrote. During her year as a site reliability engineer (SRE) for the company, she says she went on to face further sexual harassment, an unresponsive HR team and gender discrimination. (Uber's CEO, Travis Kalanick, once nicknamed his company "Boober" because it helped him to attract women.) In June, Kalanick resigned amid allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment at the company.

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Fowler is by no means alone. According to research by the Trade Unions Congress and the Everyday Sexism project, more than half of women in the UK have been sexually harassed at work. The figure rises to 63 per cent for women aged 16 to 24.

Heather Marie is the CEO of Shoppable, a universal checkout that allows people to buy products from multiple retailers across the web. While attending a conference a few years ago, she arranged a meeting with an investor. "[He] made it clear from the start he had no intention of discussing my business," says Marie, He said so outright: "I just took the meeting because you're hot."

Her story is depressingly commonplace. Catherine Ashcraft, a senior scientist at the National Center for Women and Information Technology, who co-authors the annual Women in Tech report, has found that women in the technology sector leave their jobs at twice the rate of men - and not to start families, as is commonly assumed. "We know why they leave," Ashcraft explains. "There is a lack of access to core creative roles, biases in everyday interactions - [women being] more frequently interrupted or having ideas ignored, and biases in employee development, task management, performance evaluation and promotion."

"Then there's the more overt factors such as sexual harassment."

After her experiences at Tinder, Wolfe's next move is, perhaps, inevitable; to challenge sexism in the workplace. This autumn, her company will launch Bumble Bizz, which Wolfe refers to as an "empowered LinkedIn".

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"When it comes to networking, there is still an underlying tension that men feel exists: Can this woman become more than a networking contact to me?" Wolfe says. She believes women can't speak or act openly in business meetings for fear of sending the wrong message.

When users open the Bumble app, they can select Honey (the new name for its dating service, to avoid confusion), BFF, or Bizz. If you choose Bizz, you can create a profile listing your current job, experience and skills. Honey, BFF, and Bizz matches are colour-coded to avoid sending a potential employer a drunken, 4am "Hey baby, you up?".

Like Bumble, Bizz will only let women initiate the conversation. "Making the first move is a very powerful tool, and it will set the tone for the entire relationship." She queries me with a "you know?" that resembles a teacher checking I've learned the lesson.

Wolfe believes Bumble will also have a long-term effect on gender roles by giving women confidence and making men "calm down". Think: fewer dick pics.

Originally, Wolfe planned to make Bizz cost more for men than women to reflect the gender pay gap - in America, women currently make 78 cents to a man's dollar - but her lawyers advised against it.

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The user experience of Bizz is essentially the same as Bumble Honey's. Users are asked to verify their identity by striking a series of poses in selfie mode. "Anything I'm doing is not particularly amazing and magical," says John Kneeland, Bumble's product manager, as he flicks through a Bizz prototype in Badoo's London offices. Kneeland, in fact, is insistent that the software is just one pillar of the Bumble brand. "What makes it amazing and magical is when it's put into the company and the culture that Whitney has made."

Alex Williamson, Bumble's head of brand

Jeff Wilson

EEvery day, Wolfe goes around the Bumble "office", which is currently based in a converted flat on the 31st floor of a residential building in downtown Austin, 2,700 kilometres from Silicon Valley, and asks her staff to rate their mood out of ten. "Ten," says one. "Eleven," follows another. There is one "9.5".

Wolfe views anything under a nine as a problem and tries to solve any issues that person might be facing on that day. When I joke that on most days I would be a four, instead of the expected (some might say, obligatory) laugh, I am met with horrified faces. "She really encourages everyone to feel like an entrepreneur," says Lauren Taylor, Bumble's director of brand development. Wolfe doesn't like to be called a "boss". A box in the corner contains copies of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant, and Wolfe tells everyone to take one home so they can have a group discussion.

"The Hive" - as Bumble's office is nicknamed - is a bright-yellow space filled with bee-and-Bumble-related merchandise. Coke bottles featuring seven staff members' names line the window, while wine bottles sit in honeycomb-shaped racks. In the corner of one meeting room, sits a candle featuring Beyoncé dressed as a saint. In the same room, I also count 23 giant plastic containers full of merchandise - lemon and honey-scented candles, lighters, water bottles, tote bags, keyrings, straw hats, foam balls and miniature jars of honey.

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In these ways, Bumble's HQ resembles many Silicon Valley workplaces, yet there are also ways it does not: one of the conference rooms is a bathroom; yellow paper flowers hang from the shower rail, casting shadows over the bath where many Bumble team members take calls. Wolfe has also been known to receive important calls in a storage closet.

"When it comes to networking, there is still an underlying tension that men feel exists: Can this woman become more than a networking contact to me?"Whitney Wolfe, founder of Bumble

The entire thing is spectacularly cute, a description Wolfe would baulk at. More than anything, she loves sitting down with businessmen who have underestimated her "feminine" brand. She imitates how they splutter when she tells them Bumble's figures (around ten per cent of its user base is paying). "'What? Wait a second. What's your name again?" she says with mock surprise, miming a businessman sitting up in his seat.

After three years, businessmen might now take Bumble more seriously. Wolfe's team are moving to new headquarters - which are still being built when I visit - complete with a bar, beauty room and (for the first time) actual desks. Wolfe shows me around the new open-plan, two-storey building. She points out to the genderless bathrooms, where she says a sign will read: "Be whoever you want, do whatever you want, just wash your hands." Nearly everything - chairs, light fixtures, bathroom tiles and mirrors - will be honeycomb-shaped. Despite this display of its success, it almost feels a shame for the company to move into a real, proper office. More than anything else, the Hive embodies how unique Wolfe's company is.

Wolfe and Lauren Taylor, director of communications and brand development at Bumble, explain this as we drive through downtown Austin in an SUV with Mariah Carey on the stereo. A car cuts in front and Wolfe's zero-tolerance attitude to abuse is tested: she doesn't visibly succumb to road rage. In practice, this means Bumble's employees are discouraged from complaining about each other and instead must go straight to the person who is bothering them.

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Inevitably, Wolfe and Bumble have faced criticism from all sides. Can an app really empower women? Bizz will be met with the same response. A reliance on profile pictures could enforce, rather than challenge, sexism in the jobs market. A 2013 study from the University of Messina revealed that when photos are included on applications, it increased discrimination based on race and physical attractiveness. Though Bumble considered blind applications for Bizz, this would provide too many challenges when it came to user verification.

Wolfe believes that the combination of Bumble empowering women to control the conversation, and a focus on removing abuse on the platform, will overcome any drawbacks of relying on profile pictures. On Bizz, women will be able to "dislike" a conversation, as Bumble believes many women feel shame about blocking and reporting men on social media. If a man gets a single "dislike", the Bumble team will review the interaction and - if disrespectful - issue a warning. Some will be kicked off the app for good, much like the boy known only as "Connor" who was publicly shamed on Bumble's blog after he called a user an "entitled, gold-digging whore" for asking where he worked. Block and report buttons will still be available too.

"I had... you know, I've always struggled with healthy relationships," Wolfe explains. "Time and again, I have always found myself in bad male relationships and I think that has really been my driving force." Clarifying - again - that she isn't talking about Tinder, she says that abusive relationships have caused her so much pain that she no longer wanted to live. "You know it's dark, dark, dark. Bad."

It is this attitude to abuse - designing an environment that puts women in control - that means Bizz, in Wolfe's eyes, can and will surpass LinkedIn. "Call me overzealous, but I truly believe that we have a real chance at taking them on," she says.

Bumble has 32 employees - only four are men

Jeff Wilson

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Wolfe is slurring her words. "I feel like I've had two cocktails," she says. "I feel a little woozy." Wolfe hasn't been drinking; rather, she's feeling the effects of allergy medication, after eating some avocado toast at breakfast that may have contained nuts. Even with the occasional fumble, Wolfe speaks with a TED Talk eloquence that seems almost rehearsed. It's something she readily admits relates to her post-Tinder media coverage. Once, in order to clear the air, she arranged for the team to go skydiving after a negative TechCrunch article that questioned many of her claims about her departure from Tinder.

She speaks uninterrupted for minutes at a time, her story a clean and clear-cut narrative of motivations and actions. Although candid about her abusive relationships and, later, mental health, she still seems to carefully construct her story. I ask her about politics, raising US vice president Mike Pence's assertion that he never dines alone with a woman. "That's so… I mean," she sighs, then pauses and begins to speak more carefully. "Politically speaking, this is not an issue of 2017 - this is an issue of the beginning of time to now."

Wolfe's cautiousness at times leaves me questioning her authenticity. Is feminism still feminism when it's profit-driven? Is Bumble's feminism, as some critics say, a marketing gimmick? "There's no sin in being a business," she says, frustration audible in her rising voice. "I think that's the big misconception with so many people, they feel like you have to choose one or the other, and I say do both in the same place."

Besides, she says, money talks. While it can be difficult to prove Bumble's impact, 44 per cent of its paying customers are female. "That is actually unheard of," she says, "No, truly, you can research that." (In 2016, only 19 per cent of Tinder's revenue came from female customers.)

Caroline Ellis, Bumble's head of operations

Jeff Wilson

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Yet originally, Wolfe didn't consider herself a feminist. "No, no, no, no!" she says, shaking her head dramatically, "We don't hate men, no, no!" She is re-enacting her response to the first article that called Bumble a feminist app. "I'm actually quite embarrassed by this. I'm a little ashamed. I had to educate myself on what feminism even means. I had to have this eye-awakening, opening…" she stumbles slightly because of the Benadryl, "experience like holy… I have always been a feminist, I have always in my soul wanted equality.

"It was like I was building a feminist company all along and I didn't know it."

That evening, we meet for dinner at Jeffrey's, an upmarket restaurant, where we're joined by Taylor, Caroline Ellis, Bumble's head of operations, and Alex Williamson, the company's head of brand. Wolfe sits down but doesn't pick up her menu until she has adjusted Bumble's social-media bios. ("Should it be 'empowered connections' or 'empowering connections?'")

What is Silicon Valley's problem with women?

When I suggest that read receipts should work in reverse - so the receiver of a message gets a nudge to reply, rather than the sender notified that their message has been ignored - Wolfe asks Ellis to arrange a meeting on the topic.

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Wolfe seldom switches off. After her fiancé had a car accident that left him in intensive care, she remained by his bedside and answered emails when he fell asleep. Yet when Williamson and Ellis start talking about looking at emails on their honeymoons (Williamson says she will dedicate two hours a day to replying to them), Wolfe interjects in shock. She wouldn't check them at all, she says, reiterating a sentiment expressed earlier, that "You have to, you have to" keep your work and personal life separate.

Tech's gender-bias problem in 2017

February

Susan Fowler wrote a blog post detailing sexist discrimination she experienced while at Uber. The ensuing scandal ended in CEO Travis Kalanick stepping down in June.

The US Department Of Labor accused Google of extreme gender pay discrimination, following a workplace audit (Google denies the allegation).

June

In a NYT piece, female entrepreneurs accused investors of harassment and discrimination. Among those named were Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital. Both apologised; McClure resigned.

Even now, Wolfe doesn't always follow her own rules: she tells me, beaming, how she hired her mother, Kelly, to help market Bumble to older women. After her youngest daughter left for college, Wolfe says her mother struggled with an empty nest and complained that no one wanted to hire her. "I said, 'Mum, you're going to work for me. You're going to market [Bizz] to women that think like you and you're going to change their mind." Many of Bumble's earliest employees were friends from university, and the company began operating from Ellis's mother's home. For her, Bumble has always been personal.

Bumble is just an app: but it's changing the discussion. It's changed the lives of Wolfe's team, her family, the women who work at the Hive. This is just the start, but it's a start.

"I'm permanently anxious, my doctor is gonna block my cellphone number soon," Wolfe says, as she drives me back to my hotel. She removes her right hand from the steering wheel and touches her thumb and fingertips together. "Sometimes my fingers go numb when I'm really nervous, it's weird." Sometimes she experiences heart palpitations. Outwardly, Wolfe is polished and perfect. Her hair's scraped back from her face, with not a strand out of place.

Throughout our day together she's mentioned the idea that all this is for her teenage self. For the first time, she seems to go properly off-script. "I know that I probably shouldn't be telling a reporter this stuff, but I don't really care because it's real, like… if a 21-year-old girl picks up a magazine and is reading about how 'every-thing's perfect!' and 'everything's great!' then what is that gonna do? That's not going to do anything."

Her bracelets clink noisily as she gestures emphatically. "I don't know what someone's perception of me from the outside is, I mean, I don't Google myself," she says. "It scares me… I think the most important thing to know is that you can be a CEO and still have problems and normal stuff going on.

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"Just because you find success in one area of your life doesn't mean that all of a sudden everything's perfect," she pauses to find the right words, "no matter how many of your goals you achieve, it doesn't make you whole, right?

"It's like a work in progress. Always."

Amelia Tait is the technology and digital culture correspondent for The New Statesman. This is her first feature for WIRED

This article was first published in the October 2017 issue of WIRED magazine